generally in the broad category of Neoromanticism (music), his music runs the gamut of pure tonality to avant-garde atonality. Of his extended motet, Today's Lord's Prayer, noted organist and choir director Joanne Vollendorf Rickards wrote Our choir was honored...to perform the premiere of Today's Lord's Prayer, ... [a] spine tingling anthem. It was truly spectacular. His Piano Pieces no. 1 and no.2 composed in his college years are intensely atonal and show the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Since then, however, he has turned to a more approachable style following the tradition of 20th-century masters including Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Béla Bartók and Arnold Schoenberg, the latter who taught his teachers Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner. His Love-Canzonettes and other works for chorus and his many ragtime works for piano are completely tonal and classically conceived, as is his Lyric Symphony and his chamber opera, Taema. His string quartets and much of his other music including his Concertino for Wind Band are tonally more challenging and structurally freer. For instance, his First String Quartet is structured freely around the octatonic scale, as is the second movement of his Symphony for String Orchestra, while his Second String Quartet employs a twelve-tone row. Of St. Clair's The Lamentations of Shinran for Soprano, Tenor and String Quartet, Boston Phoenix music reviewer Lloyd Schwartz wrote in February 2000: St. Clair has created a fascinating sound world, both charged and atmospheric. His is a stirring and original voice. Composer David Cleary, writing of the same work in 21st Century Music said, This nearly half-hour long setting of 13th-century Buddhist poems proves fascinating from start to finish, exhibiting numerous deeply-felt variants on oriental sensitivity and exquisite melancholy. Writing in New Music Connoisseur (2005), Cleary commented as follows on St. Clair's 2005 cycle, "Songs from the Chinese": Asian verse has inspired some of Richard St. Clair's most ambitious efforts. Thus it's no surprise that his "Songs from the Chinese", a setting of ten Yuan dynasty poems scored for voice, flute, contrabass, and piano, is satisfying to hear. One encounters pentatonic touches sprinkled throughout its mildly spiced tonal language, but never to the point of parody. And the wide-ranging textual tone elicits comparably varied approaches to vocal and instrumental writing. Yet there's a charming and heartfelt overall ethos to the cycle that ably binds disparate moods. After twenty-five years of study and practice in Buddhism, St. Clair returned to